Monthly Archives: December 2011

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Every year we have allegations of a “War on Christmas.”As with virtually everything else in our divided land, this is couched in partisan political terms. The “liberals” are the Grinches. This is mostly silly stuff and the politicizing of it even sillier.

Yes, there are people who oppose Christmas out of fear of the government supporting one religion over another, and some absolutists want all religious references stripped from any governmental entity. So a Menorah next to a Christmas tree would still be offensive to extreme secularists. It is the silly season, since then we’d be bound to change Santa Monica to Monica, Santa Barbara to Barbara and San Francisco to Francisco. Reminds one of the Soviets changing St. Petersburg to Leningrad. Given the problems in our society, this is not a battle worthy of being fought.

As a Jew, I’m happy to wish people a Merry Christmas. I’m happy to hear the Christmas music. I once even went to a Messiah sing-a-long. Loved it. But what about all those Christian words? Why would I take them literally? After all, do I feel like a hypocrite for singing “Give me home where the buffalo roam” when I really don’t want buffalo traipsing through my living room? I am not forced to be a literalist. I can enjoy the songs.

And if I get my category wrong or if someone wishes me a Merry Christmas, why should there be offense? It is the thought that counts. Besides Christmas is a birthday party. So what if the birthday child was not a member of my family, can’t I still enjoy the party? But, of course, he was a member of my family. Merry Christmas!
2011 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

Even during the craziest times, there is always something to be thankful for. Even in the sadness of loss, we can always be thankful for having known that person, even through the tears.

Even me. I am thankful for my life, for second chances, for do-overs and the chance to start over again.

I am thankful to my parents for bringing me into this world where I can find my purpose and for taking care of me and providing for me when I was growing up, for buying me those silly Halloween costumes with masks, for sending me to college, to my father for teaching me to drive while maintaining your calm and composure and for throwing me all those birthday parties.

I am thankful to Sister Barbara for listening to me and encouraging me, to Jack for helping me when I barely had a dime to my name, to Pam for offering to pick me up at the airport when I came to Chicago and for offering to help me on my flight back, if there wasn’t a hidden motive there, to Karen for being my friend. I wish you were still here. To Mariel, my editor at the Los Angeles Daily News for asking me to blog for them a few years ago. It’s been a fun ride, to Niki at the Area Wide News for supporting me and for her graciousness and humor and to many more.

Even though it’s harder to say and much harder to see, in ways I am thankful to those who have been utter skanks to me and have thrown me curve balls in one way or another. Through them, I have learned that some things aren’t a function of me; they are a function of them and that their snarkiness, ill will and general all-around lousy humor are a function of who they are rather than what I am. It’s been a hard lesson, and in the end, I thank them.

We all have a list of things that we can gripe about, and if I could unveil mine, it would be longer than a phone book of these United States, but even though it is hard, life goes down more smoothly when we view it with an air of gratitude and thanks because things happen how they are supposed to and for the best even if it may not seem so at the time. Happy, Happy, Merry, Merry.

Ron Paul will win the Iowa Caucus no matter whether he actually comes out on top or not. A win for him simply means a solid showing which he’ll make. He’ll accomplish that feat because he has a legion of young, and not so young, fanatical true believer devotees that have anointed him as the political second coming of St. Paul and Mother Teresa. They do three things that are absolutely indispensable to a successful campaign and that’s organize, organize, organize.

They do it with zest because they buy hard into his off-beat views, from slashing government down to virtually nothing to his controversial off beat quips on race matters. During the 2008 presidential campaign, they rabidly defended Paul against all comers even after he was unceremoniously dumped from the ballots. This created a huge problem not for the Democrats, but for the GOP. The millions that went into a swoon over Paul were in no mood to mob the polls to vote for another placid, corporate, Beltway insider GOP presidential candidate. John McCain was that candidate. The absence of Paul on any ballot meant an absence of thousands of voters who in any other season might have cast a vote for the GOP. GOP mainstream leaders thought then that they had seen the last of the aged party gadfly and his fanatical hordes. They assured that his extreme choke the eyes out of government view would not cloud the GOP’s tunnel vision drive to make President Obama a one term president in 2012. They were dead wrong. Paul not only refused to go quietly into the night but has emerged scarier than ever in 2012.

Paul’s fanatical backers have been enthralled from the moment that Paul got a national platform to yap about the issues. He is their lone Jeremiah crying in the wilderness against big government, big taxes, big corporate domination, big socialized medicine, big wars, and demanding a return to unfettered liberty and freedom (conservative interpretation of it that is). But that’s not the only thing they like about Paul. He fanned anti-immigrant flames. In a 30 second TV spot that ran in New Hampshire during the 2008 campaign, he demanded that students from alleged terrorist countries be denied visas into the U.S. Paul offered no proof that there are hordes of students pouring into America to commit terrorist acts. The ad was more than just a cheap ploy to fan terrorism fears. This reinforced the worst in racial and religious stereotyping and negative typecasting. The stereotype is that anyone in America who is a Muslim with a non-white face is a terrorist.

Paul topped that with the infamous slavery quip that he made on Meet the Press during the campaign. He claimed the Civil War was an unnecessary bloodbath that could and should have been avoided. All Lincoln had to do was buy the slaves. Other slave promoting countries, asserts Paul, didn’t fight wars and they ended slavery peacefully. Paul’s historical dumbness could and should have been laughed off. It wasn’t. It was intently debated, and defended. The scarier point was that it was taken seriously at all.

Paul’s intrepid band of true believers was unfazed by the controversy; they reveled in it. Paul gave them plenty more ammunition. He asserted that blacks are criminally inclined, political dumb bells, and chronic welfare deadbeats. There was also the alleged Paul hobnob with a noted white supremacist. Here’s what Paul on his campaign website ronpaul2008.com had to say about race. In fact he even highlighted this as “Issue: Racism” on the site. “Government as an institution is particularly ill-suited to combat bigotry.” In other words, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of education school desegregation decision, the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and legions of court decisions and state laws that bar discrimination are worthless. Worse, says Paul, they actually promote bigotry by dividing Americans into race and class.

Paul’s views are an arcane blend of libertarianism, know-nothing Americanism, and ultra conservative laissez faire limited government. In the four years since Paul rammed himself on the national scene as a name force that line has gripped the imagination of millions of Americans who believe that Congress and the GOP and the Democrats are hopelessly insular, corrupt, inept, and that they are rushing headlong to spend the nation into free fall debt. This they say will ultimately reduce the country to backwash penury nation status.

Paul made sure that he would stay within reach of grabbing the GOP presidential contender brass ring in Iowa by never wavering from his stock call in the debates for a debt free, bare bones government, and a neo-isolationist foreign policy. This has been a surefire formula to stir the juices of the frustrated, angry, and naive flock. This is the nightmare Paul adroitly poses for the GOP and the nation in Iowa and beyond.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

After the lie of threatened mushroom clouds over our cities ten years ago, after the lie of major military operations being completed eight years ago, now we are really leaving. Or is this too a lie?

With our largest embassy in the world in Baghdad being staffed eventually by close to 15,000 potential targets, hostages and victims, we don’t seem to be leaving. Yes, our official soldiers are going, but with Marines and private contractors aka mercenaries, we are still going to be in Iraq. Why?

Our real reason, our true policy aim in invading Iraq was neither cynical nor simply therapy for W’s Oedipal issues. Nor did we go in to own all the oil. If our lies were incredible, our motives were relatively benign. However, we didn’t have a coherent plan. We wanted to block Iranian ambition. We wanted to stop them from running the table and creating a Shiite Crescent from Tehran into the heart of the Sunni Arab nations.

In terms of our stated goals–getting rid of Saddam and making sure there were no weapons of mass destruction, well, we succeeded long ago. In terms of our real policy goals of weakening and limiting Iran, this war has been an abject failure. As in Vietnam, we won all the battles but lost the war.

We leave Iraq politically weak and once again on the verge of a civil war that will end either in the slaughter of the Sunnis or the military intervention of Sunni Arab states. We leave Iraq with Iran having much more power and influence and all but paved a road into the heart of Arabia.

Building a democracy in any meaningful sense was impossible–and we knew it. With three Kurdish factions, Sunni Arab versus Shiite Arab and ethnic Arabs against ethnic Persians, there was no chance that any group could have faith in elections. There could be no social contract across these lines. This vision of democracy was an illusion bordering on a delusion.

However, our real goal of limiting Iran and leaving us with major military bases to deter their ambitions would have been difficult but not impossible. The possibility of success was eliminated the moment we decided that all the Sunnis who had worked for the Saddam regime were to be cut free. Iraq lost its cadre of competence. The officer corps was gone. The police dispersed. The bureaucrats unemployed. We fired the people with guns and put in those whom they had oppressed. What could possibly go wrong?

George Santayana got it part right when he observed that those who forget their history are condemned to relive it and make old mistakes. It is also true that those who forget their history won’t repeat their successes. After WWII we did not send packing every German who had been a member of the Nazi party. We needed competent police, administrators, managers and bureaucrats. I’m hardly soft on or forgiving of Nazis, but we did the right thing then, and we failed to learn from our success in Iraq.

This misadventure has been an unmitigated disaster and tragedy. Saddam and his rotten sons are dead but the far more dangerous Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs are both empowered and emboldened by our multiple failures.
2011 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

You all have seen the English language bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare & Company. If you’re a writer, you’ve visited it. If you were ever an American in Paris, you went in. If you saw this year’s Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris, it was one of the last shots. It has been an institution forever. Both the store and the owner are of some sentimental value to me because I ran the store, if only for about 2 hours.

The owner and founder of this incarnation of Shakespeare & Co, George Whitman, died this week at 98, and neither Paris nor literature will ever be the same. He is an historic link in 20th Century literature. From Hemingway to Ginsberg, from Anais Nin to, well, me, all the famous and the hopeful came by.

I first walked in around 1 o’clock in the afternoon one sunny August day in 1965. I knew nothing about the place, its history or George. It was just a quaint little bookstore across from Notre Dame. I was soon disabused of my ignorance and navet.

While I was browsing, George called to me and asked not if he could help me but if I would run the store while he went to lunch. He pointed to two cigar boxes for taking in money and making change, and then he went away. I wish I could theorize that he saw something special in me. But I can’t. I was an American. I looked relatively clean and sober for 1965 and spoke English (no French at the time). He just wanted to go to lunch and trusted people. Extraordinary.

He came back. Thanked me and that was that, at least until 1991 when once more I sauntered in. George was at the little desk (not really a counter) and I reminded him of my unique and memorable encounter with him. He was good enough not to pretend that he remembered. Since I was living in the south of France and only in Paris for the day, I inquired about a caf where I could write. He quite naturally, for him and surprisingly to me, offered me an upstairs room with a remarkable view and an incredible history. I am sure I spent more time imagining I could hear the walls talking and recounting history than actually writing.

Whether productive in word-count or not, I have joined in a large group of grateful American writers who have been touched by the grace and generosity of George Whitman. We will remember him in our thoughts and in our work.
2011 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

One thing that can’t be said about erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is that he doesn’t lack gall. His quip that the Palestinians are an “invented” people was so galling that even some of his GOP presidential sparring partners had to blanche. Keep in mind the GOP contenders all to a person are about as staunch of supporters of Israel that you’ll find on the planet. But they also recognized that the foot-in-the mouth, headline grabbing, a historical absurdity that Gingrich uttered about the Palestinians and coming from a leading GOP presidential contender no less, simply tosses more kerosene, on the always inflammatory Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Gingrich’s silliness comes at a time when diplomats of all stripes are working hard to break the logjam in Middle East talks and jumpstart negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials.

It does everything to taint and jade the Middle East peace process, while further increasing tensions and strains in the region. But considering that the dumb “invention” quip comes from a guy who’s gone through every tortured gyration in recent months to unload his mountainous baggage, and to retract, sanitize, and contradict his statements and positions uttered over the past two decades, and that includes his smiling embrace with Yasser Arafat in 1997 and his sympathetic words about the Palestinians, then nothing that comes out of his mouth should surprise.

Gingrich got the word “invention” right. He just got the group he applied it to wrong. He really meant himself.

My, my. What politicians won’t do to throw dirt at each other during election time. It would make a war zone look like a yoga retreat.

The fact is that GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich did hug Yasser Arafat, but then Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, shook hands with him at the Oslo Accords. Does that mean that he would have done the same now if both were alive. Not at all.

The truth about Gingrich is that the man has more skeletons in his closet that a biology professor at Yale. We know that he did the down and dirty by serving his wife with divorce papers when she was in the hospital with cancer. We know that self-discipline and self-control were never his nicknames unless someone was being sarcastic, and we know that he would get nominated for Miss Congeniality in a beauty pageant.

But given how things have played out in this country, we may not need that. I like that he called Palestinians terrorists because that’s what those who lob rockets and grenades at children and civilians are. I liked it when he said that the Palestinians are invented people, because before 1968, they were just your garden-variety hostile Arabs. And I like a politician who has the temerity to tell it like it is. He may be just what we need in these times.

There’s general agreement, even in these toxically partisan times, that Newt is the most entertaining and interesting candidate anywhere. He’s a provocateur, and I’m happy he’s strutting and not fretting his hour upon our political stage.

He gets into trouble with virtually everyone across the political spectrum. He’s too soft on immigration for some. He’s too tough on foreign policy for others. There’s always something to love and hate in this Mercurial font of endless ideas.

Therefore, I shouldn’t have been too shocked finding myself defending him–twice this week!

Newt is being attacked for having shaken Arafat’s hand. Oh please. We talk to adversaries and even enemies. You don’t make peace or create understanding by either avoidance or rudeness. If Newt promises not to call Obama a traitor for only offering to meet Ahmadinejad, I’ll give Newt a pass on shaking the hand of the late head of the Palestinians.

I also agree with his technical analysis that the Palestinians aren’t a people. He called them an invented people which seems a little pejorative but not wholly inaccurate. It’s true that there’s neither a religious nor genetic test for being a Palestinian. We usually mean an Arab from what both Arabs and Jews once called Palestine–a formerly British protectorate and before that a small piece of the Ottoman Empire.

When I was young, I considered myself Palestinian. My Zionist family was always collecting money for our homeland, Palestine. We sang songs about building our land together with our Arab cousins. We also sang songs committing ourselves to fight for Palestine. Only we assumed we would be fighting the British and not our Arab cousins.

The old Hebrew word for the tribe of Arabs we now call Palestinians was Philistines. But modern Palestinians can be Christian or Muslim, descended from Arabs or the rich ethnic mix of the Levant. So, while Newt is technically correct on this point of linguistics, he doesn’t really advance any useful information or perspective.

So, while he won’t get my vote, I’m not so stuck in partisanship as to refuse to give this devil his due.
2011 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

It’s time to start nominatinf the poster children for birth control. This minute’s nominees are Karen Francis Severson and Laura Ann Doyle, both 44, of the San Fernando Valley.

Their nomination, a long time coming, started in 1985 when the two women were teens and got miffed because they believed that their supposed long-time neighbor and childhood “friend” Michelle “Missy” Avila, was sleeping with their boyfriends. Though they took out their anger and concern in ways that the average person wouldn’t. They coaxed Avila into the Angeles National Forest and beat her, cut off her hair and drowned her before covering her neck with a one hundred pound.

Doyle sent Avila’s mother, Irene Avila, a condolence card along with twenty dollars. But Severson did something more reprehensible and sinister. She moved into the Avila’s home with her two year-old son under the guise of helping the family find the killer.

The pair was arrested in 1990 after a teenager reported seeing three women go into the forest and only two come out. Both were convicted and given 15 years to life. Severson, who now has multiple sclerosis and has gone to Bible studies, tutored others and managed to obtain a PhD in theology in prison, has been paroled and Doyle’s parole hearing is set for July 3, 2012.

But neither one deserves to mingle with the general public because there were many ways they could have handled their anger. They could have split up with the boys on the mere suspicion that they had strayed, or they could have stopped talking to Missy Avila. That’s what a sane person would have done, and that’s what they didn’t do.

How well they behaved in prison, who they helped or what kind of degrees they earned doesn’t matter. They were not only conniving and continued to mislead the Avila family until their arrest, but they were in their late teens when they committed the crime and certainly old enough to know better

Not only are they a strong argument for strong birth control but for what’s wrong with our system.